“Did you do the paintings?” Aurora was asking.
“Just a hobby,” Nona demurred, but Luke knew she loved her art. “You will stay for breakfast, of course. When was the last time you had pannkakor?”
Luke felt his stomach rumble. “You know I wouldn’t touch Swedish pancakes unless you made them, woman.” He said to Aurora under his breath, “Because she’d kill me if I ever did.”
“Ach, such a cheeky man,” Nona scolded, and punched his arm affectionately. Unfortunately, it was his injured arm and pain exploded in his biceps, a blinding red heat. Aurora gasped in sympathy. Nona was immediately shocked. “Luke? What is it? What did I do?”
“Wasn’t...you,” Luke ground out through the red haze.
“He’s injured,” Aurora said. “I think we better take a look.”
In the bathroom, Aurora sat him on the tub and took off his shirt. Her hands on his buttons, sliding over his shoulders and arms, the smell of her hair, was sweet torment, bringing back a flood of arousing images from their last bathroom encounter. With Nona hovering anxiously in the doorway, Luke couldn’t give in to his immediate desire to kiss the curve of Aurora’s lips, to open her mouth under his while his hands moved over her breasts, ridding her of unwanted clothing...
Luckily Nona’s gasp brought him back to the present before things could get out of hand. His grandmother was staring at the ugly rent in his flesh, the black stitches.
“It’s better than last night,” Aurora said quickly, to reassure her. “Much better. Do you have peroxide, antibiotic cream?”
Nona hustled out, and Luke managed a grin. “She has enough here to stock a small hospital. She was always stitching me up when I was a kid.”
“I know,” Aurora said distractedly as she eased the bandage from the wound, and then amended, “I bet.”
He reached out and grabbed her around the waist with his hands. Her face flushed at his touch and his groin tightened and he had to focus to remember what he was about to say. “All right, what do you mean, you know?”
But he fell silent as Nona bustled in again with a plastic box filled with neat lines of bottles and tubes and gauze. Aurora quickly stepped away from him, slipping into the space between the door and the sink, to let Nona take over.
“What mischief have you gotten yourself into now, Luke Mars?” Nona clucked at him as she unpacked bottles.
“It’s a case, Nona,” Luke started.
“A case,” Nona said heatedly. “Always a case. What kind of excuse is that if you’re killed?”
She turned to him with a wad of cotton in her hand and a bottle in the other. Luke eyed it. “That looks like it’s going to hurt.”
“It is,” Nona said darkly, and poured something sharp-smelling on the cotton. Then before Luke could react she simply leaned in and doused the gash in his thigh with the stuff from the bottle.
“Yeow!” Luke yelped, along with a string of more colorful complaints, as the solution bubbled up and pinkish streams of the foul tincture and blood ran down his leg.
Nona used the wet cotton to daub at the edges of the wound. Her daubing was gentler than her voice.
“Run out looking for trouble and you’re going to find it. You always had a bad Norn,” she muttered.
Luke felt cold shock at the word. Amid all the weirdness he’d forgotten how often he’d heard that phrase growing up, and others like it. But considering the past twenty-four hours, maybe he should be paying more attention. He glanced toward Aurora, who blushed and looked away.
“Maybe I do.”
Aurora jolted, and looked about to say something, but then clammed up as if she’d thought better of it.
And whatever Luke was going to say was drowned out by his own curses as Nona splashed another round of tincture on his wound.
“Are you trying to kill me?” he finally spluttered more coherently.
Nona shot back, “Someone beat me to it.” She took out antibiotic cream and gauze and went to work. “Is one of you going to tell me why you’re not in a hospital?”
Luke and Aurora glanced at each other simultaneously, a guilty look, like children caught in the middle of a plot.
“It’s complicated, Nona,” Luke began.
“And I suppose a simple old woman like me can’t possibly understand,” his grandmother suggested ominously.
The problem is that you always understand too much, Luke thought, and then gave in, as he always did to her.
“I think I was set up,” he said, and glanced at Aurora, who was very still in her corner. “I think someone from my unit might be in on this, and it’s just better for now for me to stay disappeared.”
Nona looked shocked, but not surprised. She was a much more sophisticated woman than she sometimes let on, and she’d been around Luke too long to be rattled by much; that’s what he loved about her. Now she glanced from him to Aurora.
“Are you hiding out, then?”
“Not exactly,” Luke said. “I think I recognized the man who shot me. That’s why we’re here, to find the man who did this.”
“Here?” Nona looked from one to the other. “What is it you can find out here?”
“It sounds crazy, but I think I went to high school with the guy.”
Now Nona looked truly shaken. “Min nads Gud...” she said softly. “And this boy is trying to kill you?”
Luke had to smile. “Not exactly a boy anymore, Nona. And I don’t know for sure that it’s him. But I think I might be able to track him down from here.”
“I will make breakfast,” Nona said decisively. With her, food was always the answer, and right about now it sounded like a pretty good answer to Luke.
* * *
First she conducted Aurora to the guest room. “You will want to wash up,” she said. It wasn’t a question, and Aurora stepped meekly past her into the room that Nona had painted white and decorated with flowers—not little printed ones but big bold splashes of color. The bed had a white quilt covered in red poppies and the walls were covered with big splashy paintings of sunflowers.
Next Nona walked Luke down the hall to his old bedroom. As soon as they were out of earshot, she turned to Luke. “And this girl is helping you how?” she asked shrewdly.
Luke paused. That’s the million-dollar question, now, isn’t it? How am I supposed to explain her to Nona when I can’t even explain her for myself?
“It’s complicated,” he said aloud, and ducked out of the way before Nona could hit him again. She barely missed, and before she could take another swipe, he added quickly, “But I think she saved my life.”
Nona stopped midswing, and stood studying him. Then she sighed and jabbed pins into her hair, smoothing it. “I’ll make breakfast,” she said resignedly.
* * *
Left alone for a minute, Aurora relaxed into the charm of the sunny, flowery room. She sat in the high-backed wicker chair and looked out the window at the garden, where hummingbirds darted and sipped from red bells of snapdragons and yellow honeysuckle. She knew the house, of course, every inch of it. She’d spent Luke’s entire childhood watching over him here, watching him like a mother, and then...like something else.
She reached for the rune on the chain around her neck and held it, remembering the first day she’d come to him, as a little girl, on a day that he was missing his parents so badly he cried as if his heart was breaking, and she felt her heart was breaking, too. It was so easy to pretend to be a new neighbor; children accepted things at face value. It wasn’t against the rules. She could play with him and cry with him and really be there for him, to comfort him however she could.
It was all so innocent at first, and then...well, then they grew. Luke grew.
Aurora found all of mortal life beautiful beyond words, if sometimes almost too heartbreaking to bear. But there was nothing more stunning than a mortal male body. Luke grew, and grew, and she couldn’t stop looking at him: the swell of his biceps, the strength of his shoulders, the huge complexity of his hands, the b
eautiful flat planes of his stomach and those rippling muscles the mortals called six-packs, his thighs...oh, his thighs...and between them the hard ridge of his sex.
And it wasn’t long before she wasn’t just looking, but wanting.
It was wrong. She knew it was wrong—for a Norn. But for a human...
Oh, it was so fine to be in the house now as a real person instead of just an ethereal presence, condemned to watch and not touch. And meeting Nona as a real human being. It was the life she’d always longed for with Luke. She wanted to be with him. She wanted...
She wanted to be real.
* * *
Luke opened his bedroom door...and stepped into the past. Like many a doting parent and grandparent, especially the female variety, Nona had kept his room pretty much exactly as it had been in high school, just as Luke had left it when he went away to college. There had been trips back, Christmas and Thanksgiving and Nona’s birthdays, of course, but spring break had been for socializing and summers had meant football practice to keep his scholarship. Luke had never spent more than a weekend home, just here and there, and he’d never really cleaned out the old stuff, although he’d been careful to dispose of his stash of Playboy magazines before he left for Stanford. Nona had a wonderfully open mind but he was only willing to test its limits so far.
So what he was now looking at was a time capsule.
There were two tall bookshelves flanking a wide desk that held a desktop computer that looked amusingly primitive now—a dial-up modem, even.
The furniture was sturdy and big enough for the six-foot-three-inch teenager Luke had sprouted into when he was sixteen. The fabrics were browns and blues and tans, put together with Nona’s eye for color but no frills; she was always good about understanding what was acceptable for a boy and what was just...not. There was a big corkboard pinned with some Senior Week photos, an old football practice schedule and his acceptance letter to Stanford. A small painted wooden box on the desk below it held his collection of concert ticket stubs, game ribbons and other miniature treasures.
One bookshelf displayed photos and Luke paused in front of it to look at the silver-framed photo of his parents—one of the last pictures taken of them. As always, looking at the picture taken when he was seven made his throat close up and his eyes sting.
A memory flashed through his mind of a little red-haired girl he used to play with when he’d first moved into the house. She must have been just seven or eight, like he’d been.
Red-gold hair...
He frowned. And without knowing why, he slipped the painted box into his pocket.
Then he moved away from the photo—and his eyes fell on another framed photo on the wall: the team with Luke in the middle holding the ball, the quarterback’s privilege.
He stepped closer to it, studying the rows of strapping young men in their uniforms, shoulder pads and cleats and all. But under all that padding...
God, we were just kids, Luke thought. It never seemed like it at the time.
Except for Tomasson. There had been something distinctly unkidlike there.
Luke scanned the rows of faces. He wasn’t hard to pick out; the white-blond hair was a dead giveaway. And yes, there was that hardness to his face, the same cruel coldness in his eyes. Luke hadn’t just been dreaming that last night. There was a disturbing quality about the boy. A meanness to the set of his face, an emptiness in those ice-blue eyes.
A chill swept through Luke, and a wave of anger—and certainty. It was him. That was the man who had tried to kill him last night.
Luke felt the presence behind him more than heard it, and turned to see Aurora hovering in the doorway. He felt a strange jolt seeing her. The feeling was hard to put into words. Desire, possessiveness, comfort...and the strangest of all: the feeling that he’d missed her, even though they’d only been separated for a few minutes.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
“No girls in the inner sanctum,” he said without thinking. Before he had time to be embarrassed, she smiled and he realized she understood it as the childhood joke it was.
“Even if I don’t touch anything?” she asked.
He looked at her. “What if I said you can only come in if you do touch something?”
Her eyes widened slightly, and he saw the high crimson in her cheeks again. He felt himself go as hard as a teenage boy. She took a step inside.
“I guess I’d take my chances,” she said, her voice low.
Their eyes were focused on each other’s faces, and Luke found it suddenly difficult to breathe. He wanted her...wanted to make out with her with all the urgent aching need of high school...and wanted to claim her with all the force of his manhood. He could feel the heat coming off her; she was as turned on, as if she could read the desire in his eyes and the wanton thoughts in his head.
Then Nona’s voice called from the kitchen, “Breakfast in five minutes!” And both Luke and Aurora shifted, as if they’d been caught naked.
Luke grinned. “She always did have that radar.”
Aurora laughed, a wonderfully musical sound.
“Did she bowl you over?” he asked. “She sometimes does that.”
Aurora looked over at him, startled. “Oh, no. I mean—I like her very much.”
“She’s one of a kind,” Luke agreed.
“And she loves you,” Aurora said with feeling.
“Who could not?” Luke joked.
Then Aurora’s eyes fell on the football photo that Luke had been looking at and she stopped still, staring at it. “Did you find him?”
“He’s there all right,” Luke said, pointing to Tomas. Aurora frowned at the image, studying it. Then she looked to Luke’s face.
“It’s him?” she asked him.
And despite his suspicions and confusion about her, Luke answered honestly. “I’m sure of it.”
Aurora took a shaky breath.
Luke turned away from the photo toward the bookcase, his eyes scanning the shelves until he spotted the four oversize volumes on the second-to-lowest shelf, each volume with a date stamped in the spine.
Yearbooks.
He reached down for the last, his senior yearbook, and crossed to the desk to open the book on top of the blotter. He flipped to the senior pictures and then to the T’s. Those icy blue eyes stared out of a photo that could have been of a Bond villain in training.
He felt Aurora step close to him, smelled that enticing honey scent of hers as she looked down at the photo with him. His body instantly responded to her nearness.
“Those eyes,” she murmured, and he knew what she meant even before she finished. “Scary.”
Luke skimmed the short list of accomplishments under Tomasson’s photo. All sports-related: varsity baseball, varsity football, varsity letters. Nothing about college, no clubs or outside social organizations. “This guy was flying under the radar even in high school,” Luke muttered, maybe a paranoid thought. But it was the fact that he wasn’t on Facebook that seemed most telling. These days not being on Facebook was suspicious behavior in itself.
“Maybe there’s something else in it,” Aurora suggested, reaching for the book.
But Nona’s voice called, “Breakfast!” and Luke turned automatically toward both the voice and the sudden smell of pancakes and frying apples drifting in the air.
“We’ll eat,” he said decisively. “And then go to the school. We should be able to get information from the office.”
And as they started for the hall, it occurred to him—he didn’t know when he had started to think of them as “we,” but it seemed as if that was exactly what he was thinking.
* * *
The kitchen was all bleached white wood and blue-and-white china; the breakfast table was piled high with all of Luke’s favorites. Swedish pancakes dripping with butter, powdered sugar and lingonberry jam, potato pancakes, stetke epler—fried apples—a rich nut-filled pastry called kringle and a huge pot of coffee. His mouth was watering at the sight and smells. Ho
w Nona had managed it in under a half hour was one of the mysteries of the modern world.
“My goodness, you should have let me help,” Aurora said.
Luke pulled a chair out for her at the table. “Nona doesn’t allow anyone in the kitchen when she’s creating. She’s a one-woman show.”
Nona tsked, although she knew very well it was true. “Sit, eat,” she urged, and Luke pulled her own chair out for her.
“Only when you do,” he insisted.
Nona sat and passed a heaping plate. “Stetke epler,” she said to Aurora.
“Fried apples!” Aurora enthused. And Luke thought he saw a flicker in Nona’s eyes.
“And if you’ll pass me the pannkakor,” Nona said, and she watched Aurora carefully as she reached for the plate of pancakes. “It’s a specialty of the hemland, the Old Country,” Nona told Aurora.
What’s with all the Swedish, all of a sudden? Luke wondered, watching. “Our country is America, Nona,” he said aloud, an old argument.
“And America is great because she allows us all to keep our old countries,” Nona shot back, and Luke suddenly dropped the argument, because he’d just taken a bite of the pancakes, and lingonberry jam exploded on his tongue and he sank into the comfort of a major carb rush. For a few minutes the only conversation was enthusiastic murmurs about the food and incoherent expressions of delight. He noticed Aurora ate just like a normal person.
An insane thought.
But he shelved it away as he tore into his own food.
* * *
When the feasting slowed down a little, Nona finally spoke. “And what are you two plotting for the day?” she asked bluntly.
Luke paused his attack on the second stack of pancakes. “Nona, do you remember a football teammate of mine named Tomas Tomasson?” Luke was trying to recall if he’d ever brought Tomas home—in a group of the guys after practice, maybe?
Nona frowned. “I think I would remember that name. Is that the one?”
He wiped his hands on a dishtowel and reached behind him to the counter for the yearbook that he’d brought into the kitchen with him. He opened the book to the photo of Tomas and held it up for Nona to see. She raised the glasses that hung from a beaded chain around her neck and squinted at the photo.
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